


On Mast or Shroud: A Gothic Terror Collection

by onstraysod



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Gen, Gothic, One Shot Collection, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 19:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 5,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: A collection of short Gothic-themed prompt fills fromThe Terror.Ch. 1: Irving + "Omen"Ch. 2: Crozier + "Black Dog"Ch. 3: Crozier + "Omen"Ch. 4: Collins + "The Dying Lamplight"Ch. 5: Jopson + "Sleepwalking"Ch. 6: Goodsir + "Transmogrification"Ch. 7: Tozer + "In Chains"Ch. 8: Hickey + "Tentacles"Ch. 9: Fitzjames + "Like Drowning"Ch. 10: Blanky + "Waking the Dead"Ch. 11: Blanky + "Hobgoblin"Ch. 12: Hickey + "The Old Enemy"Ch. 13: Fitzjames + "The Black Spot"Ch. 14: Goodsir + "The Dying Lamplight"Ch. 15: Fitzjames & Crozier: "The Dying Lamplight"





	1. Irving + "Omen"

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to everyone in the lovely _Terror_ fandom on Tumblr who sent me these prompts.
> 
> New chapters will continue to be added as they are written.
> 
> Title taken from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He did not believe in omens, signs, or prognostications. Would not have, even if it were not blasphemous and sinful to do so. Irving tried, therefore, to disregard it, to put all thought of it permanently out of his mind. It had been a mere fluke, nothing more.

But it was hard to dismiss it. The Bible was tightly bound, and when he took it from his pocket and laid it upon his small desk — as he did every evening before bed — it stayed shut. It was not one of those books that, by nature of its binding or use, fell open to the middle or to some frequently perused page.

But that night it did.

Irving noticed it just before climbing into his bunk. The Bible lay open, its cream-colored pages gleaming in the guttering light of his oil lamp. He reached out and pulled it toward him, curiosity winning out over good sense. For some reason his hands had started to shake.

He had seen other sailors use the holy book for divination: had seen them open pages at random, scouring the passages thus revealed for some hint of things to come. He had rebuked them for it, punished some, but he knew the practice endured. Even on this ship. Even now.

He squinted at the page heading. The light fell unevenly, obscuring some parts of the text, highlighting others. It was the Book of Job.

_Behold, the hope of him is in vain; shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?_

Irving did not believe in omens. But he crawled into his bed and pulled the blanket over his head, trying not to imagine the Leviathan waiting for them all outside.


	2. Crozier + "Black Dog"

In need of a little exercise, Crozier had decided to walk around the ship, an eager companion at his side. The brisk air had made a puppy of Neptune again: the great black Newfoundland raced and capered like a dog half his age, running away from Crozier and dashing back again to nuzzle his huge head against the captain’s hip. Crozier rubbed at Neptune’s ears and thumped his mittened hand against the dog’s flanks, grateful for his antics: at least someone was finding joy in being beset.

The sun was still up, though everyday its power waned and its march across the sky was shortened. A thick fog had descended that morning, enveloping the ships, rendering _Erebus_ nothing more than a dark smudge against the horizon. Crozier stayed close to _Terror_ , examining the extra planking for signs of buckling as Neptune bounded off into the distance. The ice was inching its way up the ship’s sides and Crozier sighed, his warm breath crystallizing. He wondered how high it would reach by the end of winter.

At the stern he gazed up at the windows of his cabin, then turned to call for Neptune. Off in the fog a black shape moved, growing larger as it came toward him. But it was not the ship’s dog.

It _could not be_ old Neptune, this creature with eyes that burned red like the hottest coals in a stove. It was twice Neptune’s height but half his girth, gaunt and humpbacked, a mass of bones hung with rags of black fur. Crozier felt his body and his mind go still, immobilized beneath the creature’s fixed gaze; he had neither the power to run nor to fumble for some rational explanation. The phantasm raised its long snout and Crozier could hear it sniffing at the wind. _Sniffing at him_. As if it would suck out all his secrets, leave them floating naked above the ice. Its eyes flamed up, flickers of fire licking at the air, piercing his soul and scorching its edges to ash.

And then the phantasm dissolved and Neptune came running from the place where it had been manifested. The Newfoundland leapt at Crozier, breaking the spell upon his limbs, and he half-embraced the dog, relishing its solidity: the masses of wild fur, the heavy bones, the smelly panted breath.

A trick of the fog, the low light. Crozier rubbed at his eyes as he and Neptune walked back to the gangway. He’d heard of black dogs that haunted Yorkshire roads, but Francis Crozier was Irish. No English demon had any power over him.

_If this place is trying to send me a death omen_ , Crozier thought, _it will have to do better than that_.


	3. Crozier + "Omen"

Crozier sat alone at the mess table, staring at the empty glass in his hand. Earlier that day, out on the pack, he thought he had seen a spectral dog in the mist, an omen of doom that had fixed him with a fiery stare. Perhaps Fitzjames had been right. Perhaps he should stop drinking.

He grasped the whiskey bottle and filled his glass again, sloshing a bit of the precious liquid down the side. It was a side effect of this accursed place, he’d decided: that wide expanse of white worked on the mind like a blank canvas, upon which a person might project any horror. Why his pickled brain had chosen a grotesque demon dog was something Crozier could not begin to fathom.

The frame around the stern windows groaned and Crozier turned to consider the dark panes. The wind had risen outside, blowing away the grim-creating fog but ushering in a mass of low-scudding clouds that obscured the stars and the thin new moon. Ice peppered the panes like grit, and snow swirled up against the glass in soft eddies, round like fairy rings.

Round like a pale, howling face.

Crozier started. The snow continued to whirl, the wind to screech between the panes, threatening words in an incomprehensible language. In his mind he returned to Banbridge, to the kitchens at the back of Avonmore House, where the family’s cook - a weathered old local widow - bent over the pot, regaling the idle maid and the wide-eyed children with her knowledge of ancient things.

“She’ll come in the night, on nights of storm. Nights in winter, when the frost paints pictures on the glass and the water in the wash basin freezes. That’s her breath, that is: the breath of death. She’ll nip at your nose, at your toes, if you let her. _The bean sí_. One of the old ones from the hills. If she comes to scream outside your window, be sure your doom is nigh.”

Crozier rubbed his eyes. Maybe a woman had pursued him to the Arctic. Just not the one he had supposed.

He took another drink.


	4. Collins + "The Dying Lamplight"

Collins could not sleep. His mind was like a runaway horse in Piccadilly, moving, moving, ever moving: startling at every noise, trampling over duties and distractions alike. He had a sense that it would only stop when it was shot down, to bleed to death slowly in the street. There was nothing else that could rein it in.

He lay on his bed with his eyes open, letting his thoughts run where they would. He’d left a lamp burning on his desk, but his small cabin grew steadily darker as the candle wore down. The dying lamplight cast wild shadows on the walls like a magic lantern, and Collins followed each fantastic figure with half-dread and half-delight. Masked demons frolicked in dancing flames, a monkey capered, and a great bear strode about on two legs. Skeletons marched in single file across a rocky landscape, each one crumbling to pieces at the end of the line. He saw two ships tip up on their sterns before sinking down beneath towering floes of ice.

And he saw himself devoured.

He watched himself, wild-eyed and open-mouthed, consumed, eaten, ripped asunder by jagged teeth and tearing claws. He saw himself dismembered, head tossed beneath his feet, bones broken. He saw his soul shredded like a sail in high wind.

And he could not stop laughing.


	5. Jopson + "Sleepwalking"

He had to keep going. Though his feet felt as dead as lead weights, though his hands were numb, he had to continue. His field of vision had narrowed so that he looked as through a tunnel, a mere pinprick of light straight ahead of him, nothing but blackness in the periphery. Somewhere out there in the midst of that light, ahead of him, his captain waited.

_His captain_. But Francis Crozier had always been more than that, hadn’t he? Jopson had once heard Crozier muse about everything a ship was to her captain, and he could only describe Crozier in the same way. More than a man: an anchor in a storm, a home in the midst of the wilderness, a compass pointing true in the vast and trackless wastes. Sometimes a father, sometimes a friend, oftentimes a hero: untouchable, unknowable, a pinnacle to be admired from a distance. And occasionally a stray: a fragile, frightened creature wandering alone and directionless, beaten so often that any hand raised for caresses was met initially with snarls.

Jopson loved him for everything he was and wasn’t, for everything he had ever been, and everything he still might be. And that was why he struggled on, though the ice froze solid around his boots and the snow bit into his skin as it fell in his face. Crozier needed him, and Jopson would not abandon him. Not now. Not ever.

Someone shook him, hard. Jopson’s eyelids fluttered and his vision suddenly expanded, taking in the expanse of the frost-coated deck. One of the Marines stood before him, hand upon his shoulder, lantern uplifted to shine in his face. Jopson felt the cold seeping sharply into his feet, his hands, his chest. He took a breath and the air stabbed into his lungs.

“Mr. Jopson, sir?” the Marine was saying. “You all right?”

“I--" Bewildered, Jopson looked down at himself. He was unshod, ungloved, dressed merely in the light shirt and trousers he’d worn to his bed. “The captain…?” he murmured.

“Abed, I expect,” the Marine answered, “as you should be, sir. It’s middle watch. I think maybe you’ve been sleepwalking.”

Sleepwalking? Jopson shivered. It had felt so real. The desperate effort to take each step, to drag his body a few inches forward. The sharp fear that he would not, could not, reach the captain in time.

Jopson fumbled some excuse to the Marine and returned belowdecks, but when he reached his cabin he did not return to his bed to catch up on the restful sleep he had sacrificed to walking. Instead he got dressed, knowing that sometimes the captain rose early, at the end of the middle watch. He could not risk oversleeping and leaving Crozier without something he needed. He would not fail his captain like that.

Not now. Not ever.


	6. Goodsir + "Transmogrification"

It is hot, so hot, and for a moment - for the briefest second - he wonders how they all came to be here together, sharing in the torments of Hell.

Then Goodsir remembers that he doesn’t believe in Hell. Never has.

Yet his vision is bathed in red and everywhere he looks there are demons: creatures with silver snouts and crooked horns and leering mouths, their membranous wings slapping against him as he moves through their ranks. High-pitched laughter and the shrill grating of a bow over catgut fill his ears and set his thoughts to stumbling like drunken dancers. He smells the roasting fat of some long-dead animal and the sweat of unwashed men, and his throat tightens instinctively to keep down a meal he hasn’t eaten. Bodies jostle and voices babble, words surrendering all meaning.

A strange transmogrification takes place before him. He sees men he knows - Stanley, McDonald - reshaped into mockeries of their former selves. Sad pantomime clowns, they sit surrounded by capering imps, alcohol sloshed onto their ruffled collars. He fights his way toward them — he must speak, there is something in his reeling, overheated mind that must be expressed — but the nearer he draws, the less important it seems. It belongs to another time, another life, when they were still men, not demons.

After examining Jacko he had picked up a small shaving mirror, held it up to his face. His reflection in the polished glass had wobbled from side to side, his hand trembling as he examined his gums, fearing what he might find. But there had been nothing, no line of blue-gray disease to mar the healthy pink. It had not yet touched him.

But now he doubts the evidence of his own eyes. In this pandemonium of noise and flame and hideous faces, he wonders if the poison is already in his brain, working its insidious devilry. For Goodsir has never believed in Hell, and yet he is suddenly certain that he is in it.


	7. Tozer + "In Chains"

He had followed Hickey because he longed for freedom. Freedom from the officers: from their falsehoods and evasions, from their orders that in the end would only save themselves while dooming the men made to serve them. He had no illusions about that. Crozier and the other high-and-mighties didn’t give a damn whether a Marine or an able seaman lived or died. They would use men like him up and then step on their corpses to ensure their own survival.

But now he realized that he’d traded one enslavement for another, a master whose motives were easy to discern for one whose ends were inscrutable. Hickey had been candid enough when he’d been recruiting, sharing his plans and suspicions, but now he was close-lipped and revealed nothing, as his mutineers fell further with each hour into madness and despair.

Tozer had seen Collins’s soul devoured by a hideous abomination, a thing outside of nature. Now Tozer fancied he could see his own soul suffering a different fate. It was wrapped in chains and sinking, down to the dead sea floor, and every link in those chains was made of molten lies, forged by Hickey’s cunning tongue.


	8. Hickey + "Tentacles"

The sound of the ice cracking as the creature broke through it was loud enough to make the whole ship tremble. Silver-green tentacles rose, the largest as tall as the main mast and even wider in girth, showering down ice crystals sharp as daggers upon the deck. The men raised their rifles, firing wildly, but it did no good: the beast’s hide was too thick and its purpose too fixed.

Hickey stood motionless, smiling, as two tentacles became five, then seven, then ten or more, waving high overhead, weaving through rigging and spars. He was still smiling when three of them descended to wrap around his body while the remainder snapped the masts like twigs. Even with no visible eyes above the waterline the creature knew its master; with some secret sense it found and embraced him. Bone-white suckers wider round than cannonballs gaped, emitting the stench of the cold void below. The void he would now rule as rightful king.

Hickey turned his face lovingly into the clammy flesh of his acolyte as he was lifted into the air. Soon he would descend to the throne of ice and stone that awaited him, and there he would craft himself a crown worthy of his eminence from the rib bones of his drowned and frozen shipmates.


	9. Fitzjames + "Like Drowning"

He’d wanted this so long. Worked for it, been wounded for it. Endured privations, vied with friends and foes alike. Traded the idle pleasures of other men for toil and danger, waited without complaint for praise long deferred and sometimes grudgingly given. He’d sacrificed so many warm bodies for the sea’s cold embrace. Life in Her Majesty’s Navy was not all the glamor of gold epaulettes and shining swords. Far from it.

But now that command was his, now that captain was his title in truth and not just in deference, Fitzjames wondered why. In the sleepless deep of the night, when he held his own private watch by the light of a flickering lantern, he wondered why he had ever longed for these ropes about his wrists. In balmy waters beneath a beneficent sun, command might be all he had envisioned it: a thing of peerless glory, buoyed upon the admiration of his men, the adoration of the public. Now, stranded in the pack, it felt to James like drowning. 

As the sea took the sailor who’d dedicated his life to her, forcing the air from his lungs, so James felt the vice of command closing around him, immobilizing mind and limbs. Responsibilities built and built like ice against the shore, and the weight of water pressed and held him down, suffocating. The walls of the ship seemed to collapse inward and James fumbled with the upper buttons of his waistcoat, tore at the cloth around his neck. His chest felt full to bursting.

He stood up, leaned over the table, hands flat upon the Arctic chart he’d been studying. His fingers spanned the landmasses of Boothia and Melville, as if he might pinch them together and crush the miles. But it was only paper. Breathing deeply, James fought against the darkness, struggling upward toward the clear, cold air of freedom. Yet the leads had closed and his liberty with them. Gone were the days of easy camaraderie: he stood alone in the great cabin, ice forming the impenetrable walls of his prison of command.


	10. Blanky + "Waking the Dead"

The thing about the leg was, it was damned loud. Mr. Honey had done a capital job of crafting it: it was so sturdy that it took Blanky no time at all to adapt to it, and he was up pacing the deck at speed the very afternoon he first put it on. But the solidity of the thing, so helpful in keeping his balance, made every step strike the boards like a thunderclap. A man could track Blanky around _Terror_ by the telltale _thump-thump_ , and what men were left aboard made sure he knew it.

“Mr. Blanky’s been on deck this last hour, sir - by the sound of it.” Little made sure to speak loud enough for Blanky to hear as he pounded his way to the mess. The ice master caught the glisten of mischief in the younger man’s eye as he walked in.

“Aye, and I’ll go back up now and dance a jig you can bugger yourself to if you don’t cut out that cheek.”

Jopson, wiping down the table, had to duck his head low to hide his stifled laughter, and Crozier grinned.

“How’s the ice?”

“Solid as ever. I’m headed down to the hold to make a fresh count of our powder stores. I’ll blast us out in spring if it comes to that.”

As he went out, Blanky mimed swinging a punch at Little and the men laughed. It was all in good-natured jest, and Blanky knew that the other officers were pleased to discern that the loss of his leg hadn’t adversely impacted his mood. And it hadn’t. He knew how lucky he was to still be breathing, especially since some had not been so fortunate. Besides that, he spent most of life living in homes of oak. It only made sense that part of him should now be made of that same sturdy stuff.

But it was damned loud. Loud enough to be waking the dead.

The hold was the coldest part of the ship, the darkest and the quietest too. Blanky winced at each thump of his leg, echoing through the stillness. The beam of the lantern he carried swung across the dark walls, passing the door of the storage space at the back of the hold where the bodies were stacked. Strong. Evans. Hornby. Darlington - at least the parts of him they’d been able to recover. How many more would yet join them in there?

He found the powder stores, but his count of them kept going astray. He remembered a story he’d heard years before, from a master on another whaler: nonsense, probably, but it had stayed with him. The man had told how, on a journey to Greenland a few seasons before, one of the ship’s boys had died of pneumonia or some such cause. They’d laid the lad out, closed his eyes and dressed him, and the carpenter had worked all night making a coffin. The sound of the work had kept everyone awake, the hammer driving every nail into the boards with a _bang-bang-bang_ that reverberated through the quiet ship. At dawn when the carpenter and others went to fetch the dead boy to put him in his coffin, they’d found his eyes wide open again, as if the pounding of the hammer had roused him for a time from his eternal slumber.

Blanky finished his count at last and headed back toward the ladder at the front of the hold, his leg _thump-thumping_ with each step. He paused once and looked back, raising his lantern so the light could fall across the storage room door. Rats were scratching at wood and canvas and frozen flesh, but for a moment it was almost possible to imagine…

“Oh, fuck that,” Blanky growled, and started up the ladder. Spirits dressed as animals were quite enough to be getting on with. The dead could kindly stay dead.


	11. Blanky + "Hobgoblin"

He saw it the evening they entered Baffin Bay. A storm was brewing to the east, lightning lancing through swirling gray clouds, and Blanky had climbed into the crow’s nest to get one more look at the waters ahead. As he tried to peer through the mist that enveloped _Terror_ , he could feel the charge in the air, the tight stillness that preceded a downpour. It crept along his exposed skin and played bony fingers down his spine.

Such air bent the light in strange ways. The fading sunlight was diffused by the fog, and small bright circles, like miniature sun dogs, floated around the masts. Blanky was not a superstitious man, but a sense of expectancy gripped him, twisting unpleasantly in his gut. The sound of the men’s voices on the deck below, the creaking of the ship’s timbers, the slap of the waves: all were lost to him up there, as if he were separated from all that normalcy by more than distance.

In the absence of sound, his other senses were acute. He felt its presence as a tremor of the air, something new coming into creation, a concentration of energy and malice. On the day they’d sailed out of Greenhithe, a dove had alighted in the Erebus’s rigging: but what Blanky now saw, or thought he saw, was no such encouraging sign.

If it had any shape, this hobgoblin of light and mist that curled itself around the mast above him, it was that of a beast, though weirdly misshapen. Its neck was too long, its limbs too elastic, its gaze too direct. A bear, maybe, or an imp in bear’s form. Its maw brimmed with a double row of teeth, like a shark’s, and it glowed a phosphorescent blue, as if lit from within by some rotting charnel fire.

And then it was gone, nothing more than a shred of mist dispersing on a rising breeze. But Blanky knew what he had seen. He would tell none of the men about it, not even Francis: he was so low already, it would be a cruelty to burden him with an omen of doom. But Francis, of all the men, would’ve believed him, Blanky knew. He’d been sailing almost as long as Blanky had, and upon some of the same strange seas. It was something that the younger, less experienced men like Fitzjames could not understand, their minds yet full of book-learning and calculations and the gears of machinery. They had not been long enough on the oceans, as Blanky and Crozier had, to learn that the world was a very strange place indeed, full of things for which there were no rational explanations.


	12. Hickey + "The Old Enemy"

He wouldn’t call it a shrine, exactly. A shrine would imply worship, and Hickey worshiped no one but himself. It was more like a collection of offerings. He kept them in a cloth bag at the bottom of his sea chest, adding to it whenever the opportunity arose.

Things found, things pilfered. Scrapings from the edges of miserable little lives. There was a small wooden figure Mr. Honey had carved for his baby daughter back home. The skull of a rat, bludgeoned in the slops storeroom. Folded into a tight square was a love letter Lieutenant Little had written to his sweetheart and thought posted with one of the whalers back in Disko Bay. At the bottom of the bag, the tooth Goddard had lost in a ship’s biscuit at one mess, its root gone all black and cankered. There was a ring, a pipe, a St. Brendan medal. And the lock of hair that had belonged to John Torrington’s sister, the one he had called out for while dying at Beechey. Oh, how he’d longed for that little wisp of golden hair, how he’d cried when he believed it misplaced. Hickey had lain in his hammock that night, humming along with the young man’s sobs.

When some misfortune befell, the other men placed the blame upon him, using any one of his many names. When a sail was shred in a sudden squall, when a spar snapped, when ice choked the open waters or crawled its way up the mast, they cursed him beneath their breath. _Old Scratch_. _Old Nick_. _The Old Enemy_.

But he wasn’t Hickey’s enemy. The contents of the bag were a humble tribute to him: to placate, to honor, to purchase his favor. From time to time Hickey dipped into the contents for his own use, but that was how it should be. He had to look out for himself, after all, and Hickey knew the Devil would approve.

No, Hickey didn’t necessarily believe in him. But it was always best to keep one’s options open. So he gathered tribute and every time he got his grog, he always paused a moment to tip his cup in silent salute.

Just in case his patron was real and watching.


	13. Fitzjames + "The Black Spot"

In his innermost thoughts he referred to it as the black spot.

He had become aware of it halfway through that long second winter. A place on the pack, between the ships and the line of jagged ice that marked the shore of King William’s Land, where a black chasm gaped open in the unending field of white. From the deck of _Erebus_ it appeared large enough to swallow a whole sledge party, if not the ships themselves, and its size was the least terrible thing about it. For it seemed to Fitzjames more than just a crevice in the ice that gathered shadows inside itself, more than a physical feature of the land. It was a hole in creation.

And, worse still, he was the only one who could see it.

He had called Le Vesconte to the rail the first time he noticed it, put the glass into his hand. But Le Vesconte had just shaken his head and given his old friend a very long look of concern. Fitzjames had laughed it off, taken the telescope again and declared he’d made a mistake. But even as he spoke for Le Vesconte’s benefit, he watched that disk of nothingness as it slowly rotated, tugging at the edges of reality.

Now he saw it in his dreams, too. He could hardly close his eyes without seeing it. He watched, unable to scream, as everything collapsed into it: men, ice, ships, light, the Passage. He felt himself pulled inexorably toward it, the flesh ripped free from his bones until there was nothing left that the darkness hadn’t devoured. He woke and immediately his hands were scrambling over his body, checking to make sure he was still intact.

Everyday the black spot got a little bigger, tendrils of darkness escaping its circumference, crawling outward to obliterate more of the world.

Sometimes, when he paced the deck, he could hear it whispering his name.

When rumors began to spread about walking out in the spring, Fitzjames overheard the men speculating about where they would go. South to the Fish River? East to Fury Beach and on to Baffin Bay? Only he knew exactly where they would all end up.

_Here, here_ , the black spot seemed to say. _For all your plans and charts, it is only the void you will find, the emptiness you will be fated to explore_.


	14. Goodsir + "The Dying Lamplight"

He had done what was necessary, but that didn’t mean he felt good about it. Guilt gnawed at the edges of him, like rats chewing on the salt pork barrels in the hold. Jacko had been the most innocent of shipmates, after all. No double pay for him, no chance to even volunteer for this hellish journey.

Goodsir kept the monkey’s corpse in his cabin: he wasn’t sure why. As evidence of his hypothesis, maybe, though the officers seemed to neither care nor fully understand. Or perhaps they just felt helpless and the sight of the small body, teeth clamped in an eternal rictus, did nothing to alleviate their despair. It felt wrong, somehow, to discard the creature like refuse now that he had used him in such a way. To cast him out on the ice, into that chill, seemed like a final, unforgivable cruelty to Harry, and the hole where both the Inuit man and Sir John had gone was both too sacred and too cursed a place to deposit the creature. So Jacko remained, laid out on the table between books and microscope and daguerreotypes. 

And his corpse stayed incorruptible.

It was the cold, Harry told himself. Despite the heating pipes and the galley stove, it was never warm inside the ship, never had been close to warm this winter. And the table on which Jacko lay was set against the outer wall, where the ice had built up a foot thick at least. But as the weeks wore on, Harry began to wonder.

It was easy now to imagine all manner of strange things. Science was slipping away from him, his numb fingers and wild thoughts unable to hold it. Bare facts fractured in this place like warm teeth. Harry sat in his cabin through the long hours of the night, staring at Jacko’s corpse, imagining the bodies of his shipmates laid out upon the ice, intact even months, years, decades after their deaths. Maybe they were all saints here and would remain, incorrupt and frozen solid, entombed in grottos of ice until the poles lost their magnetism and all the continents of the Earth shifted. Or maybe Jacko, the innocent, was the only saint and the rest of them would crumble into dust, forgotten by time at the moment of their demise.

Sometimes that didn’t frighten Harry. Sometimes he longed to be forgotten.

But occasionally, in the dying lamplight, his whole being was seized with a terror he could scarcely bear. Light and shadows fell across Jacko’s open eyes and wherever Harry moved in the room, they followed him, swiveling in their dead sockets. He saw accusation in those dull gray eyes; he saw blame and a simple, primal anger.

He saw his own body, laid out face-down on some boards, a cold cadaver in the vast and pitiless operating theatre of the frozen, sterile north.


	15. Fitzjames & Crozier + "The Dying Lamplight"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was inspired by _Wuthering Heights_ , H.P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider," and the gorgeous [A Lighthouse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15933398) by [th_esaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus).

They sat up late in the great cabin the night before the abandonment, and in the dying lamplight they could almost pretend to be cheerful. But it was a hard pretense to maintain. There were only so many synonyms for hope and, once they had exhausted them, there was nothing left but silence. There were other, more truthful words, but those they refused to speak.

“I saw a ghost once.”

Francis turned to look at James. Their mutual silence had stretched on so long that he had almost forgotten his fellow captain’s presence at the table. James was turning an empty glass around in his hand.

“I was staying at the country house of some friends of mine,” he continued, gaze fixed on the glass. “I’d never been there before, so the place was unfamiliar to me. It was an old, rambling Elizabethan manor, full of wings and staircases and long corridors. I got up in the middle of the night, possessed of a sudden hunger, and decided to make my way down to the kitchens by some back stairs. I had a candle, but its light could barely penetrate the shadows beneath those high ceilings, and I wandered about for a quarter of an hour, at least, feeling increasingly foolish and frustrated. Finally I turned another corner I thought might be the one leading back to my room, and that’s when I saw it. At the end of the hallway, a figure clad in white, standing still with a sort of halo of light about its upper body.” James laid a hand against his stomach and moved it up, indicating his head and torso. “I knew it could be no other living creature, for as I moved slowly closer it advanced towards me as well, yet it made not the slightest sound. I could hear my own footsteps, the rasp of my own breath, but from this phantasm, nothing. It seemed to grow in size a little as I approached it, and when I held up my free hand before me to ward it off, the specter raised its own hand as if to reach out and claim me.” James let his voice fall into silence and he looked at Frances, a small smile playing on his lips. “It was a mirror, of course, set in the wall at the end of the corridor. I myself was the ghost.”

Francis didn’t laugh, or even smile. “I don’t like that story, James,” he said quietly. “Tell me another one. Tell me of one of your exploits in some warm, sunny clime. Tell me about something stupidly brave you once ventured.”

But James just shook his head. “I have no more of those, Francis. All I have left are ghost stories.”

Their tongues lapsed back into silence, but their flesh spoke. Francis’s fingers sought James’s and their clasped hands rested together atop the slab of polished oak. Outside the cabin, the wind howled its way across the pack.

“If you should die first, Francis,” James said, his voice as quiet as Francis had ever heard it, “haunt me. Promise me this. Haunt me, pursue my steps, hover around me as I sleep. But don’t leave me alone in this wretched place.”

Francis wanted to remonstrate with him, but found he didn’t have the strength. His fingers wrapped tighter around James’s, so tight he could feel the pulse still surging strong beneath his skin. “I promise. If you will promise me the same, James.”

James nodded. The lamplight was now a mere pinprick reflected in his dark eyes. “I swear it, Francis. I will not give you a moment’s peace.”

In later days Francis will remember this night, and how well James kept his word.


End file.
